She had a magazine open -- upside down -- in her lap, and she was "reading" to Jonathan.

She was -- she is -- my cousin Katherine.

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Because of an enormous family and sheer timing, she's my first cousin, but she's several decades my junior. I was there the day my aunt -- who is as much my friend as she is my father's baby sister -- went for her first prenatal appointment.

I was there when my husband, my only-child husband who told me on our first face-to-face meeting that he didn't want kids, changed his mind.

He fell in love not with Katherine exactly -- although by rights, he still adores her -- but with a little girl.

With curls and short little fingers.

With a soapy scent and a love of cuddling.

With a funny little girl reading a magazine upside down.

That was Christmastime 2003.

It would be a late night in January 2004 when he whispered in my ear, "Let's make a baby."

It would take me two more months to go off of birth control, seven more before the two pink lines would show up on a stick. It would be a full year before I lay in a dark room with a technician rubbing goo on my swelling stomach.

"Do you want to know what you're having?" she asked.

He grinned. "Yes."

He didn't have to tell me he wanted a girl, knew we were having a girl. He had faith.

He would have to keep that faith for months -- our little girl crossed her legs in the sonogram and refused to share her secret. We left knowing our baby (Squirmy as we called he/she then) was healthy, but not the gender.

It didn't matter. He knew.

He knew even as we chose a girl name and a boy name. He knew on the day before our little girl was delivered, when her heart rate slipped and they put me through first a non-stress test and then sent us for another sonogram to ensure nothing was wrong, as they discussed inducing labor.

And when our doctor quipped, "Well, that's one less circumcision I have to do" (what can I say, his sense of humor is what made me a loyal patient), he puffed up with pride.

People ask why we've decided to stick with one child, and it was a decision that took me several years to make.

But my aunt knew when she called me the morning after my nighttime delivery.